Facebook for Business Part 1

Why would you want to use Facebook for Business?

Where else can you reach so many people (current estimates are over 1 billion people on Facebook) so quickly?

Where else can you find such a desire and ability to share in terms of gossip about people's experiences, both good and bad?

Where else can people readily comment back and create interaction with you and your business so easily and speedily?

Promoting your business is all about five things:

Attention

Trust

Interest

Desire

Action

If you get all of these five right, people will buy from you and you will sell your products and services. If you consistently get these five right and do it often enough you have the ability to become very very wealthy. Alternatively, because you're offering very good value for money, you will be satisfying the needs and wants of many many people.

So let's look at these in turn with relation to the use of Facebook and your marketing program.

In "Facebook for Business Part 1", we are going to focus on getting attention.

Attention

Attention is the drawing of somebody's senses towards what you are looking to present to them. Getting attention on the Internet can be quite a challenge because you are competing with millions and millions of other attention grabbing aspects of the World Wide Web.

Placing your attention-getting resources in front of people has never been easier. You have the ability to use videos, images, music, speech, text and sensationalism to grab people's attention.

It's not just a matter of having the right stuff, it's also where you put it. Ideally, start with your website blog. And your blog need not be called a blog. You could call it a news file, latest news, updates, gossip, info or any number of other relevant titles. The important things are that it is interesting, memorable, relevant and engaging.

Having completed your blog post, either automatically or manually transfer this into your business Facebook page and write an appropriate text entry is a caption. Make sure that you use one of the images in your blog post as an image in your Facebook post.

Next, "share" the Facebook post. This could be on your personal timeline, on somebody else's timeline, other Facebook pages to which you have administration rights, groups to which you belong and personal messages to friends.

Tips and Tricks to Getting Attention

Make best use of colours, shapes, video, words, context and placement

Don't be offensive

Use humour carefully. Very awful humour (such as "dad's jokes") can be helpful in getting attention but if there is no humour at all, you can alienate people.

Don't steal other people's jokes unless you acknowledge from where they came.

Make sure that any images and videos and text that you use, you have the right to use.

If you can fit it into an existing conversation, particularly one that has the interest of a lot of relevant people (many people have clicked "Like" or have commented) you have a larger audience who already are devoting their attention to that conversation. This means they are already engaged and may follow your attention-getting contribution to your desired destination.

Watch out for the next instalment of "Facebook for Business" where we will look at TRUST.